Bill Moyers on What’s Wrong With Our Media

Bill Moyers on What’s Wrong With Our Media
By: Nicole Belle on Sunday, November 4th, 2007


Four years ago, without public input, the FCC rolled back 30 yr old rules that limited a single company’s ability to be able to dominate local TV, newspaper and radio media markets. Thankfully, the rules changes triggered a massive public response and through legislation and lawsuit, they were defeated. Now FCC chair Kevin Martin is attempting to do it again by trying to push through a similar set of changes allowing further media consolidation as soon as December 18. This time, we needn’t wait until we have been sandbagged. You can help by contacting Congress and the FCC now to stop Kevin Martin before he gets away with slipping this one by us.

Bill Moyers then goes one further and focuses on one glaring example of how our media is already failing us today:

VIDEO:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/11/04/bill-moyers-on-whats-wrong-with-our-media/

BILL MOYERS: It’s important who owns the press, as we’ve just seen and heard…but it’s also important who decides what is news.

Takin' It to the Streets - A Bill Moyers Essay

BILL MOYERS: It's important who owns the press, as we've just seen and heard...but it's also important who decides what is news.

Why wasn't it news last weekend when more than 100,000 people turned out in 11 cities across the country to protest the occupation of Iraq...Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Orlando, Salt Lake City, New Orleans, Jonesborough, Tennessee. but if you blinked while watching the national news, you wouldn't have known it was a story. We found less than two minutes of scattered mentions on television, and not even the Associated Press reported on other demonstrations in smaller cities.

Here in Manhattan, thousands of people took to the streets in a steady rain -- but the national coverage was even damper than the weather. THE NEW YORK TIMES didn't even run a story at all. and local television coverage was sparse.

40 years ago opposition to war was a big story.

more at:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11022007/transcript3.html

warranted for incarceration.

NoFederales

The trick is to alert people so they can get to their phones...

BUT the reason there was so much protest and demonstrations, was the DRAFT. Young Americans did not believe in the Viet Nam War. They did not want to go to a war that had no bearing on this country.

Just like the reasons for the Iraq War were figments of George Bush's imagination. Young Americans are tired of the killing and destruction, and for what. We are freeing the Iraqi people. We are not protecting them from an invader, we are the invaders. We, yes, this country, has almost completely destroyed the houses, the businesses, the infrastructure and most of all I really believe almost a million Iraqi citizens.

Are we immune to killing and violence. Or is it, because we are involved we don't care?

At least it was made real to the American people via the media.

Daily roll-calls of the dead on the evening news, coverage of the funerals and footage of the flag-draped caskets being loaded and off-loaded from the planes. We aren't allowed to see any of that now.

Another of the many things about the * admin. that make you go "WTF?"

is one of the most important. What doesn't make it on is de facto censored, but there's plausible deniability oftentimes based on busy-ness, news "judgment," etc. That's one reason it's so important to examine what the parameters of that news judgment are. k&R

Forgot to tape Moyers this week ..so will watch it online.

I LOVE the programs Bill puts together. He always tells the story straight forward and tries to dig far enough to get the truth.